Mark Juergensmayer Why Guys Throw Bombs
online
Mark Juergensmeyer
Why Guys Throw Bombs
from Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, Third Edition, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003
Nothing is more intimate than sexuality, and no gre-
ater humiliation can be experienced than failure over
what one perceives to be one’s sexual role. Such failu-
res are often the bases of domestic violence; and when
these failures are linked with the social roles of mascu-
linity and femininity, they can lead to public violence.
Terrorist acts, then, can be forms of symbolic empower-
ment for men whose traditional sexual roles—their very
manhood—is perceived to be at stake.
Before we rush into an analysis of terrorism as a
man’s occupation, however, we have to acknowledge
the fact that some women have played active roles in
terrorist movements. The assassin who in 1991 killed
Rajiv Gandhi, the son and successor of India’s prime
minister Indira Gandhi, was a female suicide bomber
who hid her lethal cargo in her sari. She had been a
member of a Sri Lankan Tamil separatist group that was
angry at Rajiv Gandhi’s support of the neighboring Sri
Lankan government’s attempts to quell their separatist
uprising. When the Tupac Amaru movement invaded
the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, in 1996, several
young rural women were prominent among the cadres,
who held the diplomats hostage. A Kurdish rebel suici-
de bomber in Turkey who killed nine people, including
herself, on June 31, 1996, in the town of Tunceli was
dressed as a pregnant woman in order to hide the bomb
that she was carrying beneath her skirt.
In all of these incidents, however, the groups of
which the young terrorist women were a part were mo-
tivated by secular political ideologies or ethnic separa-
tism; they were not religious. The Palestinian women
who became martyrs as suicide bombers in 2002 were
members of the secular branches of the Palestinian inde-
pendence movement, and not from Hamas, the Islamic
branch. Only one Hamas suicide bomber has been a wo-
man, a well-educated sister of a man who was killed in
the Israeli military incursion into the city of Jenin. She
was acting in revenge for her brother‘s death. In gene-
ral women have not played a prominent role in militant
religious movements, although some groups–especially
those that are less conservative in their religious ideo-
logy–have provided an ancillary role for women.
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In the Irish nationalist movement, for example, wo-
men formed their own paramilitary group, Cumann Na
Mbann. Their main role, however, was to carry guns and
explosives for the men to use in the military cadres of
the Provisional Irish Republican Army.1 The movement
for Sikh separatism in India adopted much the same po-
sition. Cynthia Keppley Mahmood reported that when a
young woman pleaded with the leader of the Khalistan
Commando Force to allow her to become a member, he
finally assented but restricted her to support roles–car-
rying munitions and messages–rather than being in-
volved in “combat actions.”2 Mahmood said that the
woman waited for the day when she would have the
opportunity to be more active. That time came when
she broke into the house of a Hindu shopkeeper whom
she suspected as having reported her to the police. She
held a gun at his head, berating him for turning her in.
The shopkeeper denied that he had done so, and was
“begging for pardon” and “crying that I was like his
daughter,” the young woman said. But she was not dis-
suaded. “I shot him down with my revolver,” she went
on to say, “with my own hands.”3
In reporting this grisly story, the young Sikh woman
said that one of her purposes in murdering the Hindu
shopkeeper was to spur Sikh men into what she regar-
ded as even greater acts of courage. If they saw that
“girls could be so brave,” she reasoned, then Sikh boys
“could be even more brave.”4 The implication was that
the task of killing was ordinarily the work of men–or
“boys,” as the young Sikh activists were called–and the
role of women was to provide support, to challenge
them, and to spur them on.
Her position was essentially that of the great martyr
in the Sikh movement, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who
addressed his congregations as if the men (especially
the young men) were the only ones listening, encou-
raging them to let their beards grow in the long Sikh
fashion and describing their cowardice in the face of
government opposition as “emasculation.” In general,
Bhindranwale’s attitude was in line with the prevailing
values of virtually all cultures of violence based on
strong traditional religious ideologies. These have been
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 Mark Juergensmayer Why Guys Throw Bombs
postures of “radical patriarchalism,” as Martin Riese-
brodt has called it.5 The role of men is in public life;
the role of women is in the home.
Religious activists often have shown a certain pater-
nalistic respect for women, as long as they have remai-
ned in their place. During the 1991–92 Muslim uprising
in Algeria, Ali Belhaj, one of the Islamic Front leaders,
said that a woman’s primary duty was to “bear good
Muslims”; and Sheik Abdelkhader Moghni, another Is-
lamic Front leader, complained about women working
and taking jobs from men. Women, he said, just “spend
their salaries on makeup and dresses, they should re-
turn to their homes.”6 A businesswoman in Algiers re-
sponded by saying she feared that if the Islamic Front
succeeded, it would usher in a reign of “pig power.”
“They’re all male chauvinist pigs,” she explained, ad-
ding, “believe me, we are worried.”7 The worst of these
fears came true in Afghanistan, where the Taliban party
promoted a male-dominant culture that did not tolera-
te women in public life, even as teachers, doctors, or
nurses. Although they claimed that eventually Afghan
society would become somewhat more liberal, they
stated that society would not be regularized until the
fighting was over. Such cases exemplify an assertion of
masculinity and a recovery of public virility that is at
once sexual, social, and political.
Does this explain why terrorism is primarily a male
occupation, and why bombs are most often thrown by
guys? I use the term guys in this case because it evokes
the camaraderie of young males slightly on the edge of
social acceptance. Moreover, it is etymologically rooted
in religious activism. The term guy came into use in
England in the seventeenth century after Guy Fawkes
was tried and executed in 1606 for his role in the Gun-
powder Plot. This extraordinary conspiracy planned by
radical English Catholics involved thirty-six barrels of
gunpowder hidden in a cellar under the House of Lords,
set to be ignited on the opening day of Parliament.
Intended as a protest against laws they thought would
restrict their religious freedom, the explosion would
have blown up both British legislative houses and King
James I. Thus the religious terrorist, Fawkes, was the
original “Guy,” and his name came to be applied to all
roguish men who skirted danger.
The religious terrorists of recent years are today’s
guys: bands of rogue males at the margins of respec-
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tability. The gender specificity of their involvement
suggests that some aspect of male sexuality–sexual
roles, identity, competence, or control–is a factor in
the attitude of these “urban males in their teens.”8
Perhaps the easiest aspect to understand is the matter
of sexual competence–by which I mean the capacity
to have sex, an ability that is limited in traditional
societies by moral restrictions and lack of opportuni-
ties. There is a certain amount of folklore about men
and guns that cannot easily be dismissed–the notion,
for instance, that sexual frustration leads to a fasci-
nation with phallic-shaped weaponry that explodes in
a way that some men are unable to do sexually. As
I mentioned earlier, the young bachelor self-martyrs
in the Hamas movement enter into their suicide pacts
almost as if it were a marriage covenant. They expect
that the blasts that kill them will propel them to a
bed in heaven where the most delicious acts of sexual
consummation will be theirs for the taking. One young
man who had committed himself to becoming a suicide
bomber said that “when I exploded” and became “God’s
holy martyr,” he was promised a place for himself and
his family in paradise, seventy-two virgins, and a cash
settlement for his family equivalent to six thousand
dollars.9 It was the virgins that seemed to interest the
young man the most.
Sexual power for many men involves not only sexu-
al competence–the ability to have sex–but also sexual
control. This means knowing when not to have sex,
and putting sex in its place. Their aversion to what
appear to be sexual aberrations–including misplaced
gender roles, such as women assuming dominant po-
sitions in the public arena–are examples of sex out of
control. To many men these phenomena also exemplify
a wider form of social disorder: they are illustrations of
the encroaching power of evil, demonstrations of the
pervasiveness of the lack of moral values, and examp-
les of how social definitions have become skewed. In
The Turner Diaries, for instance, William Pierce spoke of
what he called “Women’s lib” as being “a form of mass
psychosis . . . promoted and encouraged by the System
as a means of dividing our race against itself.”10
This concern with sexual roles elevates the issue
beyond one of simple sexual competence or control on
a personal level. For Pierce, sex is a social problem:
roles and conduct out of place in what he regards as a
society in moral decline. Moreover, it is a public pro-
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 Mark Juergensmayer Why Guys Throw Bombs
blem that leads in some cases to hostility. It is anger
against sex out of place that is often evident in the
targets of violence, such as abortion clinics and gay
bars. At other times the violence itself has had sexual
overtones, as in India and Algeria, where the rape of
women has been employed as part of a terrorist act, or
in Ireland, where torture of enemies has involved mu-
tilation of the men’s genitals–literally, in some cases,
emasculating them.
What is the connection between these forms of vi-
olence, this macho religiosity, and these yearnings for
political power? The antipathy toward modern women–
the notion of female sexual roles out of place–is one
clue. The hatred of homosexuality is another. It is true
that the disdain of homosexuality has been a theme of
conservative religion for centuries and was one of the
criticisms that the religious opponents of the Enligh-
tenment leveled against the values of secular morali-
ty in eighteenth-century France.11 But it has returned
with a peculiar stridency in contemporary religious cul-
tures of violence, where the fear of homosexuality–ho-
mophobia–has been a prominent theme.
Virtually all radical religious movements of the final
decades of the twentieth century have had a homo-
phobic twist. In 1999 a gay couple was killed in nort-
hern California and gay bars were attacked allegedly by
Christian Identity activists. Gays were included among
the “mudpeople” that Benjamin Smith hoped to destroy
in his 1999 Illinois rampage, and The Turner Diaries
described homosexuality as a kind of aberration that
“healthy males” would not consider.12 Some have gone
so far as to misquote the Bible in prescribing “the pe-
naltys [sic] for race-mixing, homo-sexuality [sic], and
usury” as “death.”13 The gay subculture of Tehran was
one of the facets of modern Iranian life that angered
Ayatollah Khomeini, and hundreds associated with it
perished following the Islamic revolution in Iran. The
acceptance of homosexuality in secular Israeli society
has dismayed right-wing Jewish activists, who offered
the rumors of Yasir Arafat’s alleged penchant for boys
as evidence of the moral corruption of Palestine’s lea-
dership.14
In Belfast, one of Ian Paisley’s main criticisms of
liberal Protestantism is its acceptance of gays. “Les-
bianism, homosexuality held up as taught in the Bible
and to be practiced by Christian people,” he thundered
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in one of his sermons, “think of it!”15 Along the same
lines, one of Paisley’s complaints about Catholic clergy
is that they never marry, a matter of some suspicion
to the arch-heterosexual Paisley. Regarding salvation,
for instance, he assured his parishioners that the Pro-
testant method was much more efficacious than the
Catholic, in large part because of the morally suspect
nature of the clergy. “You do not need to kneel at a
confessional box,” Paisley told them, “before a bache-
lor priest who has more sins than you have and yet
pretends to forgive you.”16
Kerry Noble said that his group, the Covenant, the
Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, regards American ci-
ties to be like Sodom and Gomorrah largely because
they harbor homosexuals.17 Noble said that one of the
turning points in his disaffection with the Christian
Identity movement was when he entered a gay church
in Kansas City with the intention of igniting a bomb
he was carrying in his briefcase, and decided not to do
it. After looking around and seeing men embrace other
men, watching women kiss other women, and hearing
the preacher speak about his male lover, Noble hesi-
tated. He had second thoughts about the loss of life
that would have resulted–at least fifty would have been
killed–and he also questioned the effectiveness of the
bombing. It would not, he reasoned, precipitate the re-
volution that he had hoped for. It was only later, after
he had rejected the ideology and the personal ties to
Christian Identity, that he also abandoned his homo-
phobia and saw gays as scapegoats for what he and his
group had regarded as society’s immoralities.
Rev. Michael Bray told me that the secular
government’s tolerance for abortion and homosexuali-
ty were the two marks of its moral degeneracy. Consi-
dering Bray’s prejudices, it is interesting to note that
when Bray was sent to prison for bombing abortion
clinics, he was placed in the same cell with a pedophile
convicted of preying on boys. Bray and his cellmate
became fast friends, Bray told me, but only after the
pedophile repented of his sins. Still, the man acknow-
ledged to Bray that his sexual inclination toward young
men persisted. When Bray refused to take part in a pri-
son prayer meeting with an out-of-the-closet gay pri-
soner who was unrepentant about his sexuality, this led
to tensions within the cell. His cellmate became angry
and accused Bray of being antigay. Bray tried to assure
his cellmate that same-sex attractions were understan-
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 Mark Juergensmayer Why Guys Throw Bombs
dable as long as one did not act on those impulses, and
as long as one felt remorseful if indeed such acts were
committed.18
Why have such aversions to homosexuality been
held so strongly by contemporary religious activists?
One answer is a loss of identity: the kind of heterosexu-
al male who is attracted to such movements is precisely
the sort who loses power in a society in which women
and gays have access to straight males’ traditional po-
sitions of authority. They see women and gays as com-
petition.
But there is another answer to the question of why
radical religious groups are so homophobic: a loss of
control. As Kerry Noble said, homosexuals have been
scapegoats for a perceived systemic problem in society.
When men have perceived their roles as diminished in
a socioeconomic system that denies a sense of agency
to individuals, either by being incompetent or over-
ly competent–a faceless mechanical bureaucracy–this
challenge has led to a defense of traditional roles. Be-
cause men have so frequently held the reins of public
order as their gendered responsibility in society in the
past, they have felt particularly vulnerable when the
public world has fallen apart or has seemed beyond
control. In this case, they have seen active women and
gays not just as competition, but as symptoms of a
world gone awry.
This is a deeper fear, and there is not much that
men can do about it. If the problem were just one of
competition, they could hope to better themselves, and
at least some would be able to succeed on an indivi-
dual basis. If the problem is more systemic, then it is
a matter of social disorder or worse: a sinister hand
controlling and disrupting the world. This perception
has led naturally to the satanization of enemies and
to theories of cosmic war. It has also led naturally to a
kind of tribal instinct that encourages members of such
cultures of violence to band together and fight.
In such a context, then, though same-sex erotic
acts are suspect, male bonding makes sense. Like the
camaradie of a football team facing a dangerous ene-
my in an uncertain struggle, the close community of
men creates a primal form of social order. Unlike he-
terosexual bonding, which leads to private communi-
ties—families—the bonding of groups made up of the
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same sex, such as nuns and monks and football players,
represents a primitive attempt to create a personali-
zed form of public society. Individuals have a direct
relationship with authority and a shared sense of re-
sponsibility in clearly delineated social roles. All-male
radical religious groups, therefore, attempt to create
and defend a righteous order in the face of massive
social disorder.
These forms of marginal, male-bonding, anti-insti-
tutional, semipolitical movements are not idiosyncratic
to the contemporary era. There have been occasions in
past centuries when noninstitutional men’s associati-
ons have spun off from mainstream religious traditi-
ons, often with violence on their agenda. The assassini
of medieval Islam are one example. The murderous,
goddess-worshiping thugs of India–from which we
get the English word thug–are another. In Christianity
we have had the “guys” of Guy Fawkes’s seventeenth-
century Catholic terrorists and before them the Crusa-
ders–blessed by Church officials, at least at the outset
of their ventures. The Freemasons of the eighteenth
century are a Protestant example of men springing from
the domesticity of Church religion and founding their
own secret order. Though not known for its violence,
the organization has skirted the edges of institutional
Christianity. So the precedent of somewhat marginal
male movements has been set within religious history.
But the proliferation of noninstitutional male paramili-
tary orders, such as the Christian militia, is a relatively
recent phenomenon. What is interesting is how intense
the internal cohesion of the groups has been.
The Turner Diaries describes an initiation into just
such an intimate male circle: the elite of the Order, as
it is described in the novel. As he entered the initiation
rites, the lead character observed a torchlight flickering
over “the coarse, gray robes of the motionless throng”
and thought to himself that these men were “the best
my race has produced in this generation.” They were
truly men with whom he wished to bond. “These were
no soft-bellied, conservative businessmen assembled
for some Masonic mumbo-jumbo,” the character affir-
med to himself, and they were “no pious, frightened
churchgoers whining for the guidance or protection of
an anthropomorphic deity.” They were “real men, White
men, men who were now one with me in spirit and
consciousness as well as in blood.”19
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 Mark Juergensmayer Why Guys Throw Bombs
As this romantic rhetoric from Pierce’s novel sug-
gests, such close male bonding could have a homo-
erotic element–perhaps paradoxically so, considering
the aversion that most men in right-wing religious
groups have to sex out of place, including publicly
identified homosexual roles. Yet same-sex intimacy has
been a strong feature of many right-wing movements.
The residents of Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations com-
pound in Idaho, for instance, have virtually all been
young unmarried men.20 Even married male adherents
of Christian Identity have found in their religious and
political groupings a certain male bond. The friendship
between Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, for ex-
ample, was so tight and time-consuming that Nichols’s
wife became jealous.
Young men who volunteered for suicide bombing
missions sponsored by the Hamas movement usually
worked in pairs and were sent out on missions accom-
panied by ritual elements often associated with mar-
riage. On one of the videotapes depicting Hamas vo-
lunteers for suicide bombings, a young man no more
than eighteen years old, wearing stylish dark glasses
and a camouflage military cap, tells about his friend,
who was sent on a suicide mission from which he never
returned: “My brother Hatim, we were friends for the
sake of God.” The night before he left, the young man
said emotionally, “he brequeathed me this gift.” It was
a dagger. The purpose was “to cut off the head of a
collaborator or a Jew.” He added, “and God living I will
remain alive, and I will be able to fulfill the vow.”21
The pattern of male bonding in radical religious
groups was also found in the movement of Sikh acti-
vism that uprooted India’s Punjab in the 1980s. Being
part of the Sikh movement was to join in a “bond of
love,” one young militant told Cynthia Keppley Mah-
mood.22 The portraits of Sukha and Jinda, the Sikh as-
sassins of General Vaidya, that many militants kept on
their walls portrayed what Mahmood called “comradely
love.” With their arms around each other’s shoulders,
they exemplified the “tight bond of solidarity among
comrades-in-arms” that she said accounted for much of
the courageous behavior of Sikh militants in the field
and the cycles of revenge killing that quickly escalated
in the Punjab. In confronting death, Sukha and Jinda
were said to have stated in their farewell address that
they imagined the hangman’s rope “as the embrace of
a lover,” and they “longed for death as for the marital
August 2005 gender...politik...online
bed.” Their own “dripping blood” would be the “out-
come of this union,” and they hoped it would “fertilize
the fields of Khalistan.”23 Friendships such as that of
Sukha and Jinda are common in societies where extra-
marital male-female relationships are not allowed, and
relationships within one’s own sex can develop to con-
siderable intensities. The Hindi and Punjabi languages
have terms for such buddies who are more than just
friends: they are yar, “intimate friends,” or yaro-ki yar,
“the best of friends.”
Friendship may also have played a role in the dra-
matic events in 1984 that led to the death of the lea-
der of the Sikh movement, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhin-
dranwale. Bhindranwale had befriended his young li-
eutenant, Surinder Singh Sodhi, whom the Sikh leader
described as “my brother.”24 Journalists considered
him Bhindranwale’s “right hand man,” “personal bo-
dyguard,” and “key hit-man.”25It was the murder of
Sodhi on April 17, 1984, that exacerbated the inter-
nal struggles between Bhindranwale’s followers and
the Akali Party forces linked with Gurcharan Singh and
Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, both sequestered in
the Sikhs’ main shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Bhindranwale accused Gurcharan Singh of having plot-
ted Sodhi’s murder, and claimed that the death of his
young comrade was like “chopping my right hand.”26
Bhindranwale spent the week following the youth’s
murder confined to his quarters. Within days Sodhi’s
killer and several members of the Akali camp were killed
in reprisal. As tensions mounted between the two fac-
tions, the Indian army invaded the Golden Temple on
June 5 in what became known as Operation Bluestar.
In the exchange of fire, Bhindranwale’s forces killed
the Akali leader, Gurcharan Singh, and Bhindranwale
himself was killed. After Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
was assassinated later that year, her son and successor,
Rajiv, signed a peace accord with Longowal, who was
himself soon thereafter assassinated, thus completing
the spiral of violence that began with the killing of
Bhindranwale’s friend, Sodhi, in 1984.
The theme of male bonding was also found in the
Hindu nationalist movement, the RSS, composed of ce-
libate men who boasted of their manhood and took
inordinate interest in providing political and religious
training to boys and young men in Boy Scout–type ou-
tings. Yet when an American scholar published a study
of one of the RSS’s spiritual heroes, Ramakrishna, re-
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 Mark Juergensmayer Why Guys Throw Bombs
vealing the homosexual aspects of his mysticism, the
clamor of protest in India was enormous, especially
among right-wing supporters of the RSS and the po-
litical party they have spawned, the Bhartiya Janata
Party (BJP).27
In the hostile Indian response to Jeffrey Kripal’s
book about Ramakrishna, it was not so much the sug-
gestion of homosexual attraction that was seen as of-
fensive but the modern Western role of the homose-
xual. The Indian critics found it inconceivable that a
spiritual hero such as Ramakrishna could be capable of
such a thing. In an e-mail rejoinder to Kripal on an In-
ternet listserv that circulated among American scholars
of South Asian religion, Narasingha Sil, a professor of
Indian origin, assailed Kripal for making it appear as if
Ramakrishna’s homosexual tendencies—his “diseased
and disturbed mental proclivities”—were “normal or
natural.” Sil was clearly upset that the guru was put in
the same category as those Indian lads “cavorting up
and down the streets of the elite quarters of Calcutta
or Mumbai, sporting nose rings or earrings.” Although
the professor acknowledged in India a certain “fond-
ness for young boys on the part of some adult men,”
it was primarily “a pathetic option for aged impotent
males.”28.
Another scholar, Sarah Lee Caldwell, writing in the
same listserv, ruminated over what she described as
“deep connections between male sexual prowess, vi-
rility, and Hindu nationalist violence.”29 In her thin-
king, the uproar in India over Kripal’s suggestion of
Ramakrishna’s homosexuality was a defensive “hyper-
masculine” response that had “roots in the colonial pe-
riod.” It was not just that Ramakrishna had a fondness
for boys: the idea that he rejected playing the hete-
rosexual male role and that his disciple, Vivekananda,
may have played a passive role in satisfying his guru’s
sexual desires was, to many Hindu nationalists, “deeply
threatening.”30 According to Caldwell, the notion that
a man would willingly play the woman’s role of receiver
in a sexual act raised specters of the “feminine” male of
India. As several other writers on India have observed,
the British view of Indian males as effeminate was part
of what has been described as “colonial discourse.”31.
India’s nationalist leaders from Gandhi to current
members of the BJP have felt obligated to reassert
the manliness and potency of India’s leadership. As
August 2005 gender...politik...online
scholars such as Ashis Nandy have demonstrated, the
rhetoric of the British colonial period that referred to
Indians in effeminite terms had a deep and enduring
impact on India’s nationalist movement, an impact that
continues to the present day.32 When the BJP came to
power and shocked the world by conducting a series
of nuclear tests on May 11, 1998, this demonstration
of power was overwhelmingly approved within India.
As one Indian scholar observed, the BJP’s display of
power showed the “hyper-masculinity” inherent in the
Hindu nationalism movement represented by such Hin-
du chauvinists as Balasaheb K. Thackeray, leader of the
Shiv Sena party, who responded to the nuclear tests
with the comment that they proved that Indians were
“not eunuchs.”33 In testing the bomb, India’s BJP lea-
ders were not only asserting their national power but
also rejecting the colonial dominance of the West and
its accompanying sense of emasculation.
Although supporters of the Christian militia in the
United States have not had the Indians’ experience of
being a colonized people, their attitudes toward mo-
dern liberal government is similar to those of neocon-
servative Hindu nationalists. Both would agree with the
characterization offered by William Pierce that liberal
government expects an obedience that is “feminine”
and “infantile.”34 These are fears not only of sexual
impotence but of government’s role in the process of
emasculation. Men who harbor such fears protect them-
selves, therefore, not only by setting up veiled defen-
ses against the threats of powerful women and unmanly
men, but also by attempting to reassert control in a
world that they feel has gone morally and politically
askew.
In Israel, the Jewish activist Avigdor Eskin, who
accused Yasir Arafat of having a sexual penchant for
boys, meant this as not so much a character assault
as a political criticism. Eskin offered the example of
Arafat’s alleged bisexuality to show that the Palesti-
nian leader could not even control his own passions,
much less the destiny of a geographical region that
Eskin regarded as sacred.35 Eskin, a somewhat effete
musician and philosopher, might have gained encou-
ragement in his attitudes from the American religious
right, for whom antihomosexuality is something of a
virtue, and with whom Eskin had frequent contact.
Raised in Russia, Eskin for a time traveled through the
United States appearing on the television programs of
6
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evangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as What they have in common, these movements of
a spokesperson against the Soviet oppression of the cowboy monks, is that they consist of anti-instituti-
Russian Jewish community. Eventually emigrating to onal, religio-nationalist, racist, sexist, male-bonding,
Israel, he became politically active among the Russian bomb-throwing young guys. Their marginality in the
Israeli community and was selected in 1998 by Russian modern world is experienced as a kind of sexual despair
immigrants as the fourth most well-known person in that leads to violent acts of symbolic empowerment.
the country. When I visited him in March 1998, he was It could almost be seen as poignant, if it were not so
deeply involved in anti-Arab political activism and was terribly dangerous.
under detention for charges of planning to toss a pig’s
head into the quarters of the Muslim shrine the Dome
of the Rock, charges he denied. Whether or not the
charges where true, however, his comments confirmed
that Eskin’s main social concern was not homosexuality
but politics and the restoration of what he regarded as
righteous biblical order.

The point I have been making is that the homo-

phobic male-dominant language of right-wing religious
movements indicates not only a crisis of sexuality but a
clash of world views, not just a moral or psychological
problem but a political and religious one. It is political
in that it relates to the crisis of confidence in public
institutions that is characteristic of postmodern socie-
ties in the post–Cold War world. It is religious in that
it is linked with a perception of the loss of spiritual
bearings that a more certain public order provided.

When the lead character in The Turner Diaries saw on

television the horrific scenes of mangled bodies being
carried from the federal building he had just demolished
with a truckload of explosive fertilizer and fuel oil, he
could still confirm that he was “completely convinced”
that what he had done was necessary to save Ameri-
ca from its leaders—these “feminine,” “infantile” men
“who did not have the moral toughness, the spiritual
strength” to lead America and give it and its citizens a
moral and spiritual purpose. From his point of view, his
wretched act was redemptive.

Trivializing the effect of their violence, this cha-

racter and his real-life counterparts Timothy McVeigh,
Mahmud Abouhalima, and many other calculating but
desperate men have tried to restore what they perceive
to be the necessary social conditions for their sexual
and spiritual wholeness. Their rhetoric of manhood has
been a cry to reclaim their lost selves and their fragile
world.

7
 Mark Juergensmayer Why Guys Throw Bombs
Endnotes
1. Martin Dillon, God and the Gun: The Church and Irish
Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 138, 143–57.
2. Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation, 215.
3. Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation, 218.
4. Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation, 218.
5. Martin Riesebrodt, Pious Passion: The Emergence of
Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran (Ber-
keley: University of California Press, 1993), 176. See also
the essays in John Stratton Hawley, ed., Fundamentalism
and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
6. Kim Murphy, “Algerian Election to Test Strength of
Radical Islam,” Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1991, 19.
7. Kim Murphy, “Islamic Party Wins Power in Algeria,”
Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1991, A1.
8. Sivan, “Why Radical Muslims Aren’t Taking over Go-
vernments,” 2.
9. Rashid Sakher, an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber, in-
terviewed by Dan Setton in the documentary film Shaheed;
the interview was transcribed and published as “A Terrorist
Moves the Goalposts,” Harper’s, August 1997, 19–22.
10. Andrew Macdonald [William Pierce], The Turner
Diaries (Arlington, VA: National Vanguard Alliance Books,
1978), 45.
11. Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment:
Anti-Philosophes in Eighteenth Century France (New York:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming). For the history of
varying Christian attitudes toward homosexuality, see John
Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality:
Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the
Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1980).
12. Macdonald [Pierce], Turner Diaries, 45.
13. David Lane, “Race, Reason, Religion,” unpublished
manuscript, 1984, cited in James Aho, The Politics of Righ-
teousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1990), 86.
14. Interview with Avigdor Eskin, writer and activist for
right-wing Jewish causes, Jerusalem, March 3, 1998.
15. Ian Paisley, “Swearing Allegiance to King Jesus,”
sermon of March 24, 1991, Belfast; reprinted in Ian Paisley,
Sermons on Special Occasions (Belfast: Ambassador Produc-
tions, 1996), 124.
16. Paisley, “Swearing Allegiance to King Jesus,” 120.
17. Noble, Tabernacle of Hate, 216.
18. Interviews with Michael Bray, pastor, Reformation
Lutheran Church, Bowie, Maryland, April 25, 1996, and
March 20, 1998.
August 2005 gender...politik...online
19. Macdonald [Pierce], Turner Diaries, 203. Italics in
the original.
20. Murphy, “Last Stand of an Aging Aryan,” A15.
21. Hamas videotape from the collection of Anne Marie
Oliver and Paul Steinberg.
22. Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation, 200.
23. Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation, 201.
24. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, quoted in Shek-
har Gupta, “Temple Intrigue,” India Today, May 15, 1984,
56–57.
25. Gupta, “Temple Intrigue,” 56–57. Sodhi was accused
of the murders of H. S. Manchanda in Delhi and Harbans Lal
Khanna in Amritsar, and of various robberies.
26. Bhindranwale, quoted in Gupta, “Temple Intrigue,”
56. Sodhi had been shot as he sat at a tea stall outside the
temple compound by a lower-caste woman, Baljit Kaur, who
worked for Surinder Singh, alias Chhinda. Sodhi had allege-
dly previously collaborated in a series of crimes with Chhin-
da, but the two had a falling out. Bhindranwale claimed
that Chhinda and Baljit Kaur were hired as a hit team by
the Akali leaders. Both were tortured and murdered hours
after Sodhi’s killing, as was the owner of the tea stall where
Sodhi was shot.
27. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the
Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
28. Narasingha Sil, “Re: Vahbharambhe Laghurkriya,”
Religion in South Asia, an Internet listserv, May 10, 1998;
quoted with the permission of Prof. Sil.
29. Sarah Lee Caldwell, “Re: Kali’s Child—Reply,” Religi-
on in South Asia, an Internet listserv, May 5, 1998; quoted
with the permission of Prof. Caldwell.
30. See Kripal, Kali’s Child, 301–2.
31. See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Re-
covery of Self under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1983); Joseph Alter, The Wrestler’s Body (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992); Mrinalini Sinha, Colo-
nial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effemi-
nate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995); Indira Chowdhury, Frail
Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture
in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
32. Nandy, Intimate Enemy.
33. Vinay Lal, “The Cultural Politics of Indian Nuclea-
rism,” op-ed article, Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1998.
34. Macdonald [Pierce], Turner Diaries, 42.
35. Interview with Eskin, March 3, 1998.